“It’s not fair to them,” Cryer says.
More than three years after ChatGPT debuted, generative AI has become a part of everyday life, and teachers and students are still figuring out how or if they should use it, especially in humanities courses.
A recent survey suggests that many students are diving in head-first: According to a survey by Inside higher education and the generation laboratory Conducted last July, about 85% of college students used AI for their coursework, including brainstorming, writing papers, and studying for exams. About 19% of students also reported using AI to write full essays.
More than half of students who used AI for their coursework had mixed feelings about it, reporting that it sometimes helps them but can also make them think less deeply.
Aysa Tarana, a recent college graduate, was in her freshman year at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities when ChatGPT launched. She says she started using the chatbot for small tasks, such as suggesting topics to research.
But Tarana says he eventually stopped using AI because it made him feel like “I was outsourcing my thinking and that felt really weird.”
That’s exactly what Cryer is worried about.
After spending a gap year studying generative AI, he came to his own conclusion: Cryer believes educators should use AI tools as little as possible in their teaching.
“It seems like one of the main purposes of these tools is to keep you from having to think so much,” he says.
Cryer says he now spends more time persuading his students about the value of working to become better writers. He says he explains to them that the goal of their education is the process, not the product, because society doesn’t need more college essays. “What we need is for students to go through the process of writing research papers so that they can become better thinkers, so that they can make a compelling argument, so that they can differentiate between a good source and a bad source,” Cryer says.
And if students rely on AI to do their work for them, Cryer says, it could end up depriving them of the education they signed up for.
A professor who sees value in generative AI
In Charlotte, North Carolina, Leslie Clement says she has come to see generative AI as a powerful collaborator that can improve student learning.
“We encourage [students] use it because we know they are going to use it, but use it responsibly,” says Clement, a professor of English, Spanish and Africana studies at historically Black Johnson C. Smith University.
Clement says it allows students to use AI to create outlines for their work, get feedback on ideas, and compare different sources of information.
Clement also co-created a course called “The African Diaspora and AI” that examines how AI affects people of African descent globally, including dangerous cobalt mininga crucial component of artificial intelligence technologies, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The course also covers the potential future benefits of AI, as well as the contributions of Black researchers and scientists.
“We’re looking at Afrofuturism, how students can use these tools to reimagine their future,” Clement says.
She says her goal has always been to foster critical, ethical, and inclusive thinking, and she wants her students to apply those skills to using AI tools.
“I want students to not only use the tools for good, but also interrogate them,” Clement says.
The AI Study Companion
A couple of hours northeast of Clement, in Durham, North Carolina, medical student Anjali Tatini has found her own ways to use AI for good. Tatini is a double major in global health and neuroscience and says AI tools have helped her better understand some of the complicated topics she has been studying.
Take last semester, for example, when Tatini, a 19-year-old sophomore at Duke University, says some concepts in a biology course confused her. He turned to Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot, for help.
“I was like, ‘This is the concept, can you explain what it means?’” Tatini recalls. “And he would just respond to me. And if it was too high a level, I could ask him to simplify it a little bit, which was very helpful.”
In other classes, such as chemistry, Tatini says she has used AI to create practice problems to help her prepare for exams; in a marketing class, he used it to generate ideas; In statistics, he has used it to help regenerate lines of code for data analysis.
It’s helpful to have an on-demand tutor, Tatini says, because you can’t always meet with your professors in person.
“I have jobs, I have other classes, I have clubs. I don’t always have time to do all these office hours,” he says. “So it’s nice to have something on my own time, able to respond to me in the same way that maybe a person would.”
Tatini puts a limit on AI writing for her. She says she will use these tools to help her outline and organize her ideas, but the actual writing is all hers.
“If I post something, I want it to be something I’m proud to say is mine. So I would never use AI to write something because it wouldn’t sound like me.”
“What you produce is like a fingerprint for the world”
Nearby in Chapel Hill, Hannah Elder, a 21-year-old student at the University of North Carolina, also takes pride in owning her writing assignments.
“I’m a big believer in cultivating your own thoughts and being able to articulate them,” he says.
Elder is a law student taking a combination of courses, including public policy and philosophy classes. She says she uses generative AI to mark your work and compare it to course rubrics.
But Elder says she would never use it to write or generate ideas for herself.
Learning to formulate your own ideas and beliefs and communicate them in writing has been one of the most valuable parts of your college experience, Elder says. He worries that if students turn to AI to do that for them, they won’t learn to think for themselves.
“I still use notebook paper [for] all my notes, because I firmly believe that what you write and what you produce is like a fingerprint for the world. And I think in a sense that’s being lost,” Elder says.
Still, Elder doesn’t think the solution is to ban AI entirely.
“We cannot deny that it will be part of this. [the college experience]”she says.
He wants educators to integrate AI teaching into curricula so that students can learn to see the line between beneficial and harmful use.
“If teachers incorporate it responsibly across academics,” she says, “I think it will look less like a cheat code and more like, ‘Oh, this is the reality of this, and this is how I can use it well, and this is how it can help me.’”
